


Jet Boy Jet Girl

by pontmercyfriend



Series: Danger Days [5]
Category: Bandom, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), My Chemical Romance, The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Battery City, Brainwashing, Character Death, F/M, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:22:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22778644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pontmercyfriend/pseuds/pontmercyfriend
Summary: The making of Jet Star.
Relationships: Jet Star/Original Character(s)
Series: Danger Days [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1636693
Comments: 1
Kudos: 55





	Jet Boy Jet Girl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spacestationtrustfund](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacestationtrustfund/gifts).



He doesn’t remember most of what happened after the one night he was taken.

He remembers hearing the knock on the door of the apartment, and his mother getting up from the dinner table to check who was there, and he remembers thinking that it could be Mikey, because Mikey sometimes liked to come over during dinnertime if he couldn’t stay in his own apartment with his distant father and dead-eyed brother.

It wasn’t Mikey. Two white-suited Exterminators pushed past his mother and spoke quickly to his father, before turning to him. They were armed; they were both wearing the distinctive SCARECROW masks. He couldn’t stop staring at the rayguns strapped to their belts.

“Exterminator Flare and their partner are going to take you to the doctor’s,” said his mother, running her hand over his short hair, “just for a little while, until you stop feeling sick, okay, sweetie? You’ll see us again soon, once you’re better!”

He tried to protest that he _hadn’t_ been feeling sick, even when he forgot to take his medications, but nobody seemed to be listening. He thought he saw fear in his mother’s eyes when she hugged him one last time, but it was quickly wiped away and replaced with a bright smile.

Exterminator Flare guided him towards the door, and he went because he knew there wasn’t another option. The other Exterminator didn’t follow; he tried to look back over his shoulder, to see his parents, but the door was already closed firmly. The elevator ride down to the first floor took a small eternity.

There was a white Better Living van sitting in the driveway of the apartment complex; Exterminator Flare herded him into the back, where a smiling woman in bright white scrubs rubbed his forearm with a cotton ball dipped in some sharp-smelling substance, then there was a syringe in his arm and he didn’t remember anything for a while.

He woke up and everything was white and it hurt his eyes.

“Good morning,” said a cheerful voice, even though there was nobody else in the room, “I hope you’re having a better day! Welcome to the Adolescent Correctional Facility, where our young citizens can learn how best to live better.”

The voice continued, but he wasn’t listening. He sat up slowly. He had been lying on a bed with white sheets, staring up at the blank ceiling. There was no furniture in the room except for a small stainless-steel sink.

He got out of bed and washed his hands; there wasn’t a mirror in which to see his face.

A door which he hadn’t noticed before slid open smoothly, silent save for a soft hiss of air, and a woman stepped into the room. “Good morning!” she said. “You must be hungry. Come with me and I’ll take you to breakfast. And remember to keep smiling!”

“What’s after breakfast?”

“Don’t worry about that yet,” she told him as they walked along an endless white hallway, past rows of identical doors. “The present is the focus; the aftermath is secondary. We’ll take care of you from here.”

He rubbed his eyes. For some reason he didn’t want to trust what she was saying.

He said, “Okay.”

The breakfast didn’t taste like anything, but he spooned it into his mouth anyway. He sat dutifully on a bench at a table in a room full of other kids all dressed in plain off-white clothes like he was and ate what was set in front of him. He hadn’t noticed his clothes before. The woman handed him a glass of water and several pill capsules, and he swallowed them obediently.

After he was finished eating, the woman took him out of the dining hall and down another corridor until they reached another room that was full of television screens. It reminded him of something, possibly sitting on the floor of his room with someone whose face he couldn’t quite picture, but the woman started speaking to him again before he could pin down the memory.

“We’re going to try a form of therapy known as Positive Thinking Reprogramming through video hypnosis,” she said, and led him to a chair in front of one of the screens. She turned on the screen; it showed static. “Ready?”

He didn’t know why he hesitated, but eventually he nodded.

He woke up in the bed again, looking at the ceiling.

“Good morning!” said the same bright voice. “I hope you’re having a better day! Welcome to the Adolescent Correctional Facility, where our young citizens can . . .”

He got up. He washed his hands. There was a mirror on the wall above the sink, which had probably always been there. He looked at himself curiously, then turned off the water. The door slid open with a hiss of compressed air.

“Good morning! You must be hungry. Come with me and I’ll take you to breakfast. And remember to keep smiling!”

“What’s for breakfast?” he asked.

He woke up in bed. The ceiling was flat and white.

“Good morning! I hope you’re having a better day! Welcome—”

He woke up in his bed.

The woman was leaning over him, and they were in a different white room. There were wires extending from his arms, going into his skin. He wanted to pull them out, but he was worried that they were attached directly to his bloodstream, and if he started pulling he wouldn’t be able to stop until he had pulled out all his veins and left them in a heap on the floor.

“You’ve been progressing very well,” she said, and then he was lying on his back again, the sheets up to his chest. _Good morning!_

He got up.

A girl sat next to him during breakfast and whispered something in his ear, even though they weren’t supposed to talk. She said quietly, “You wanna get out of here too?” When he didn’t answer, she continued, “My friends and I can getcha to the Zones, if you want.”

He woke up in his bed. The voice over the intercom was repeating the standard greeting; he got up and washed his hands. There wasn’t a mirror over the sink. There never had been. He didn’t know how many days he had been waking up.

He sat next to the girl again. She said her name was Rosie and her friends were called juvie halls. He thought he should probably know what that word meant. Rosie said she was a mole, and he nodded like he understood.

It was something to hold on to, and he turned the word over and over in his head while he sat in the chair with the wires under his skin, or in front of the television screens that never showed anything but empty static. Rosie, Rosie, _Rosie_.

Rosie didn’t take her medications at breakfast, he noticed the next day or maybe several days later. She pretended she was taking them, then slipped them secretly into her pocket. He wanted to try.

He woke up in his bed. The woman said, “I’m very disappointed in your progress, but we can always improve what’s imperfect. You must be hungry! Come with me and I’ll take you to breakfast. And remember to keep smiling!”

Rosie wasn’t at breakfast. He didn’t think there were any other meals in the day.

He woke up in his bed.

He didn’t take the pills again that morning, but this time he was more careful. Nobody caught him.

Rosie didn’t come back. He lay on the bed and thought about where he had been before he had been here. He couldn’t picture his mother’s face, or his father’s, but he remembered the feeling of his mother’s soft hands brushing his hair, and his father swinging him around before carrying him into the dining room for dinner.

There were meals that weren’t breakfast. He woke up in the bed, got up, washed his hands at the sink where there wasn’t a mirror because there never had been, and went obediently where the woman took him.

He remembered skinny knees and sharp elbows and eyes looking owlishly at him from behind round glasses. He couldn’t tell what color the eyes were, but he knew there was a name associated with them. Mikey, he thought. MikeyMikeyMikey.

He woke up. Rosie was standing over him.

“Hey, you,” she said, and tugged on his arm until he got up. “C’mon, fella, we’re breaking outta this eggshell and flying away.”

He didn’t wash his hands at the sink where there was now a mirror, where there hadn’t been a mirror before. He didn’t know what else to do, but he said yes when Rosie asked if he knew how to fire a raygun, because he didn’t think it could be that difficult to figure out. Point at the target and pull the trigger.

The door slid open with a hiss. Rosie ran out into the hallway.

He followed.

There were other people in the hallway, and he could hear the sudden loud crackling noise of laser blasts and smell the acrid tang of burning skin. Rosie shot at a group of draculoids that was coming towards them, and one of them fell down with smoke rising from its chest, and then another one crumpled when Rosie fired her raygun again, and then another.

Rosie grinned. “Fuck yeah,” she said, and tugged on his arm again. “Sayonara, vamps, let’s jet outta the Stacks.”

They ran.

Rosie hummed something while she led the way out of the building and into a car, which she drove. There were three pedals instead of two, like on the cars he had seen in textbooks or in the white Better Living Industries van. He thought he could remember the words to what she was humming, but they stayed stubbornly on the tip of his tongue, just out of reach.

He looked down at his hands and thought about his mother and his father. He still couldn’t picture their faces.

He could see the entrance to the Stairs up ahead, the gate was closed and blocking the way into the tunnels. He remembered suddenly that the Stairs led out of the city.

Rosie didn’t slow down. She whooped as the car sped towards the gate; there were draculoids clustered near the entrance, waiting for them to stop.

They didn’t stop. Rosie kept her foot on the pedal and the car crashed through the barrier. He covered his face with his arms, but when he opened his eyes again, they were still driving. The sun was very bright.

The road wasn’t smooth or neat. He could feel every jolt of the shocks from every bump and pothole.

Rosie kept driving anyway.

Finally she stopped the car and looked over at him, grinning. “All right, buddy, here we are at the drop-off spot. If you head along this road for a bit, you’ll run into a place called the Loose Wire. Ask for Crash Kid Jam, that’s my boyfriend, and he’ll getcha a leg up, okay?”

Rosie gave him a bag with some water and food and a spare weapon and hugged him before she left. He crawled out of the passenger seat into the sand and the sun and all the danger of the desert, reborn.

It took a few weeks of walking, hitchhiking, and hopping rails to make it to the old pile of RVs that was called the Loose Wire. He had somehow wound up in a bit of trouble with some grease monkeys wanting to rough him up, and that’s how he discovered Kiss Cam—the JetStar motorcycle he was on broke down and he was left stranded, on his back in the dirt, squinting up at the backlit image of a woman with a motorcycle helmet, pigtails, and more weapons than he’d ever seen on one person before.

“Who are you?” he managed to croak, squinting up at the vague silhouette, backlit and wavering.

He couldn’t see her smile, but he could hear it laced all through her words when she spoke. “Oh sweetheart, I’m the best thing you’re ever gonna see,” she said, and held out a hand for him to take. “Need a ride?”

His hair was longer now that he didn’t have a way to cut it. He liked the way it curled around his shoulders; he wished he could clean it. He didn’t want it to dread.

He wanted a razor. The stubble on his face was itchy and uncomfortable.

Keep your back to the sun, sharpen your knives, and watch out for ghosts.

He woke up flat on his back, gasping. The air was hazy with the blur of early morning. Someone was hovering over him, hair tickling his face. Or no—not hair. Feathers, long and black and shiny. A purple mist swirled around the stranger and the mask covering their face, oblong and wooden and painted.

 _Happy birthday_ , he-she-it-they said.


End file.
